Introduction

The world view
expressed in one of humankind's most ancient texts, the Tao Te
Ching, is remarkably similar to one of the most recent
comprehensive metaphysical systems, the process metaphysics of Alfred
North Whitehead. At the core of each is the recognition that
process, not substance, is the fundamental characteristic of the
world; what is most real is change and movement. In this chapter I
look at how this concept turns our usual notions of reality on their
head, why it makes sense to think this way, and what implications
this ancient way of thinking has for our conduct in daily life today.

Ontology

It is useful to think
of philosophy as having three main branches: ontology, epistemology
and ethics. Ontology, from the Greek ontos, being, is the
study of what is real. Epistemology, from the Greek episteme,
knowledge, is the study of how we know what is real. Ethics, from the
Greek ethikos, having moral character, is the study of what to
do about what is real.

Every culture embeds
within its taken-for-granted common knowledge some notions about what
is real. Embedded in the human perceptual apparatus is an intuitive
classification of what we experience, including an intuitive physics
and an intuitive psychology; and we know how to distinguish reality
from imagination. Ontology is the careful critique of these
common-sense intuitive notions with a view to finding out what is
most fundamental to everything that is. It the study of existence
itself considered apart from any existent object.1

The question is how
best to characterize everything that is, apart from any particular
set of objects, to answer the question “what is real” in
the most general sense. The answers are important because they
underlie and inform the way we approach the world and conduct our
lives.

The Mechanistic World View

What is the most
fundamental characteristic of all that is? Throughout European
history from the Greeks onwards, the answer has most often been
framed in terms of substance, inert stuff that occupies space and
persists through time, which are conceived as mere containers. The
ancient Greek philosopher Democritus held everything to be composed
of atoms, which are physically indivisible, separated in space and
always in motion. Aristotle gave a privileged position to substance
among his ontological categories; for him the primary sense of the
word “being” is substance. In this view the properties of
substances are never touched by change, which affects only the
relations between substances.

In the 18th
century, with the rise of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton asserted
that reality consists of solid, impenetrable particles, and ever
since then we have thought ourselves to live in a world that is
fundamentally physical and causally determined, a Newtonian
mechanistic universe in which inert matter is all there is and every
change is determined, much like the movement of billiard balls. The
success of the technological accomplishments we have enjoyed since
then lends credence to such a view. But such a cold universe leaves
no room for human freedom and creativity.

René Descartes
conceived both physical and mental reality as substance. The former
he called res extensa, Latin for “extended thing,”
after its primary attribute, extension in space. The latter he
called res cogitans, or “thing that thinks,” after
its primary attribute, the ability to be conscious. The problem with
such a dualistic metaphysics is that it is incoherent. Ever since
Descartes, philosophers have grappled with the so-called “mind-body
problem,” how to explain how two such ontologically disparate
substances can influence each other. I say “so-called”
because it is a problem only given the metaphysical assumptions
within which it is framed. Descartes himself had to resort to yet a
third category, a benevolent, all-powerful and supernatural God, to
reconcile the two.

Dualism has a certain
appeal. It is not surprising that we find the idea that things endure
through space and time comfortable and familiar, because in our
ordinary experience they do. Our minds have evolved to have an
intuitive grasp of the physics of objects. It is also not surprising
that we do not like the idea that our experience, feeling and
cognition – in short, our mentality – is a mere byproduct
of material causes. We know subjectivity, experience and volition
first-hand and we have an intuitive grasp of the psychology of others
like us, which has proven to work out correctly over and over again
in the long history of our race. The two realms – body and mind
– seem distinct and have different qualities. But dualism is
unsatisfactory, because it lacks a coherent explanation of how body
and mind can influence each other. Other attempts to solve the
problem – asserting that the mind is just an effect of physical
causes or that mind is primary and the physical is an illusion or
that mind somehow emerges from the physical as the latter becomes
more complex – are all unsatisfactory as well. There must be
something better.

Process Metaphysics

Fortunately, there is
another explanation of reality that does not suffer from such
defects: process metaphysics, also called process philosophy. This is
the view that reality is best understood as processes rather than
things, that the fundamental character of all that exists is change
and that enduring objects are best understood as persisting patterns
amid change, much like the flame of a candle. It too has been present
in European thought from the time of the Greeks. Heraclitus used the
metaphor of a river, which remains what it is by changing what it
contains.2
Change is a necessary condition for constancy; without it we would
have only lifeless uniformity and would not even know it, because
knowing itself is a temporal process.

In the twentieth
century the most elaborate and thoroughly-developed version of this
ontology is that of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was a
mathematician who finished his career teaching philosophy at Harvard,
where he formulated a metaphysical system based on the idea that
reality is made up of atomic or momentary events, not inert
particles. This is not an intuitive idea, and his major work, Process
and Reality, is a dense, highly-technical work over 500 pages
long. I’ll try to summarize it briefly.

These events, which
Whitehead calls “actual occasions” are a bit like
subatomic particles, with some important differences:

Each is momentary,
coming into being, going through various phases and then passing
away.

The final phase of
an actual occasion is not fully determined by the beginning. There
is room for novelty, for the possibility of something new coming
into being.

Each actual
occasion has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past
and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion
of experience.”3

What we think of
as a particle is actually a series of these actual occasions. A
single electron is a series of momentary electron-occasions that
form an enduring object much like the momentary frames of a movie
form a continuous picture.

The primordial
experiences of the actual occasions comprising living things, such
as plants, animals and human beings, bind together and reinforce
each other, giving birth to a higher-level experience. The richest
and most intricate example we know of is our own conscious
experience.

This doctrine is known
technically as “pan-experientialism.” It solves the
mind-body problem by asserting that everything has at least the
rudiments of mind. Everything, even non-living things and even at the
tiniest, most elementary level, has some sort of primordial
experience. I like to say that everything has an inside and an
outside, the inside being the world as experienced by the entity and
the outside being the way that the entity is experienced by other
entities.

Another way of saying
this is that to be real is to have an effect. If you think of
something that has no effect, then what you are thinking of cannot be
real. The minimal effect something has is to be detected by something
else. We never find something being real without something else being
real as well. Relatedness, as well as process, interiority and
creativity, is fundamental to the way things are.

Chinese Metaphysics

For several thousand
years a civilization at least as accomplished as European
civilization has viewed reality in terms of process and patterns of
change instead of isolated entities. The surprising (to Western
sensibilities) efficacy of Chinese medicine has led to an increased
interest in the world-view of that ancient culture. The difference
between West and East can be striking. In a book whose title nicely
summarizes the Chinese worldview, The Web That Has No Weaver,
Ted J. Kaptchuk tells of a Western doctor and a Chinese doctor
diagnosing six people complaining of stomach pain. The Western
doctor, using X-rays and endoscopy, diagnoses all six as having the
same problem, peptic ulcers. The Chinese doctor looks at an array of
signs and symptoms, including the patients’ emotional
disposition, the color and texture of their tongue and face, the
quality of their pulses, and many others. He diagnoses each one as
having a different problem, such as “Damp heat affecting the
spleen” or “Deficient yin affecting the stomach,”
etc. For each one he prescribes a different regimen. The Western
doctor looks for an underlying pathological mechanism. The Chinese
doctor looks for a pattern of disharmony involving many elements.
“To Western medicine, understanding an illness means uncovering
a distinct entity that is separate from the patient’s being; to
Chinese medicine, understanding means perceiving the relationships
between all the patient’s signs and symptoms.”4

The Chinese worldview
sees the world in terms of relationships, patterns and change. For
the Chinese there are two fundamental laws underlying change in the
universe, the law of polar reversal and the law of periodicity. Polar
reversal means that things change into their opposites, but not
only that. Even more profoundly, the seeds of change are carried
within each entity; each entity contains within itself the tendency
that will one day manifest as its opposite. Periodicity means
things change in recurring cycles, like night and day or the changing
of the seasons.5

The symbol for polar
reversal is the well-known Yin and Yang symbol, a circle divided into
two curving sections, teardrops separated by an S curve, one white,
representing Yang and one black, representing Yin. In the center of
the white portion is a black dot, symbolizing Yin within Yang, and in
the center of the black portion is a white dot, symbolizing Yang
within Yin.

The author of The
Web That Has No Weaver gives the clearest account I have found of
Yin and Yang:

The character for Yin originally meant the shady side of a slope. It
is associated with such qualities as cold, rest, responsiveness,
passivity, darkness, interiority, downwardness, inwardness, and
decrease.

The original meaning of Yang was the sunny side of a slope. The term
implies brightness and is ... associated with qualities such as heat,
stimulation, movement, activity, excitement, vigor, light,
exteriority, upwardness, outwardness, and increase.6

All things have both
aspects, a Yin aspect and a Yang aspect. They are not separate, but
are always found in relationship to one another.

Thus, time can be divided into night and day, place into earth and
[sky], season into inactive periods (fall and winter) and active
periods (spring and summer), species into female and male,
temperature into cold and hot .... These qualities are opposites,
yet they describe relative aspects of the same phenomena. Yin and
Yang qualities exist in relation to each other.7

Yin and Yang mutually
create each other. One could not understand heat, for instance,
without the concept of coldness, nor tallness without shortness, nor
good without harm or right without wrong. Lao Tzu, the perhaps
mythical author of the Tao Te Ching says

Being and non-being produce each other;
Difficult and easy complete each other;
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low distinguish each other;
Sound and voice harmonize each other;
Front and back follow each other.8
(Chapter 2)

Yin and Yang mutually
control each other. If Yin is excessive, then Yang will be too weak
and vice versa. If the temperature is too cold, then there is not
enough heat; but if both are in balance then the temperature is
comfortable. If they are out of balance, then the situation is
precarious and likely to change, and is not conducive to harmonious
action. Again from the Tao Te Ching:

[One] who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
[One] who strides cannot maintain the pace.
[One] who makes a show is not enlightened.
[One] who is self-righteous is not respected.
[One] who boasts achieves nothing.
[One] who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao,
“These are extra food and unnecessary luggage.”
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.9
(Chapter 24)

Yin and Yang mutually
transform into each other. This can happen in two ways, one
harmonious, in the normal course of events, and the other sudden and
disruptive of harmony. The former is the give-and-take relationship
found in all things and in everyday life, as the out-breath follows
the in-breath or waking follows sleeping. The latter happens when Yin
and Yang are out of balance. In that case there will be a rapid and
drastic change from one to the other. In an unbalanced situation
there are actually three possibilities: rapid and disruptive
transformation; graceful rebalancing, which is the aim of Chinese
medicine; or termination of the pattern altogether, in other words
death. The Tao Te Ching says

That which shrinks
Must first expand.
That which fails
Must first be strong.
That which is cast down
Must first be raised.
Before receiving
There must be giving.

This is called perception of the nature of things.
Soft and weak overcome hard and strong.10
(Chapter 36)

The Chinese world view
does not think of cause and effect in the same way as the western
world view. Instead of looking for an external cause for each event,
one looks for the pattern being expressed. The I Ching, or
Book Of Changes, an even more ancient text than the Tao Te Ching,
contains sixty-four hexagrams, combinations of Yin and Yang (broken
and whole) lines, which represent recurring patterns of reality. “In
Chinese thought, events and phenomena unfold through a kind of
spontaneous cooperation, an inner dynamic in the nature of things.”11
“Things behave in particular ways not because of prior actions
... of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving
cyclical universe [is] such that they [have been] endowed with
intrinsic natures which [make] that movement inevitable.”12

The key word is pattern. The world is

an integral whole, a web of interrelated things and events. Within
this web ... an entity can be defined only by its function and has
significance only as part of the whole pattern.13

This metaphysics ... [is] from Taoism, which altogether lacks the
idea of a creator, and whose concern is insight into the web of
phenomena, not the weaver. For the Chinese, that web has no weaver,
no creator; in the West the final concern is always the creator or
cause and the phenomenon is merely its reflection. The Western mind
seeks to discover and encounter what is beyond, behind, or the cause
of the phenomena .... Knowledge, within the Chinese framework,
consists in the accurate perception of the inner movement of the web
of phenomena. The desire for knowledge is the desire to understand
the interrelationships or patterns within that web, and to become
attuned to the unseen dynamic.14

Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching
(pronounced “Daodejing”), from which I have been
quoting, is an ancient classic of Chinese literature, written down
around 400 BCE, during the Warring States Period, 476 BCE to 221 BCE.
It was a time of constant warfare among feudal states in the central
Chinese plains, full of battles, intrigue, shifting alliances and
broken treaties. Technological advances in the art of warfare led to
more and more bloodshed and greater and greater consolidation of
power, coming to an end in 221 BCE with the rise of the Qin dynasty,
which had conquered all the others. In the midst of carnage and the
horror of war, the Tao Te Ching offered a vision of a more
harmonious way of life.

The title is translated
in various ways. Tao means “way” or “the
way.” Te means virtue in the sense of "personal
character", "inner strength", or "integrity."
The semantics of this Chinese word resemble the English virtue, which
developed from a (now archaic) sense of "inner potency" or
"divine power" (as in "healing virtue of a drug")
to the modern meaning of "moral excellence" or "goodness."15Ching means “book” or “classic.” Thus
the usual translation is “The Book of The Way and Its Power.”
The name of its author, Lao Tzu, literally means “the
old one” or “old master.” He was probably an elder
contemporary of Confucius. The story is that he was an official in
the imperial archives of the Qin and had devoted his life to learning
how to live well. Refusing to commit anything to writing but having
gained some acclaim, he left for a journey to the West at the end of
his life and was persuaded by a guard at the gates to write down his
wisdom. The result is the book we know as Tao Te Ching.

The book consists of 81
short poems, which are ambiguous and elusive. The topics range from
lyrical mystical insight to political advice to rulers to practical
advice for people. Some of the major themes are the ineffability of
the source of all things, the importance of Yin or yielding energy
symbolized as feminine (rather a counterbalance to the Yang effort of
warfare), the need and indeed inevitability of return to a primordial
state, emptiness as efficacy and power, the usefulness of humility in
knowledge, and many others.

A Whiteheadian Interpretation

The recent, Dao De Jing: A
Philosophical Translation, by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall,
claims that the work is best understood in the Whiteheadian tradition
of process metaphysics. The authors translate Dao De Jing as
“The Classic of This Focus (de) and Its Field (dao).”
Here they take De to mean the particular virtue or excellence
of an individual moment of experience and, by extension, of the
ongoing person whose experience it is. They take Dao to mean
the contents of one’s field of experience, which ultimately
encompasses the entire world. The aim of the Tao Te Ching,
they say, is “bringing into focus and sustaining a productive
disposition that allows for the fullest appreciation of those
specific things and events that constitute one’s field of
experience.”16

The specific things and
events of which one is conscious at any given moment have a two-fold
character. They are elements in one’s own experience and as
such are unique, personal and private. And they are elements within
the world that extends beyond one and as such are part of the
universal web of relationships. The aim of life is to harmonize
one’s experience such that one takes the widest scope of the
world into the richest particularity of one’s own personal
experience. This is an artistic view of life that seeks beauty and
harmony.

Structurally, we are
like actual occasions who take in all the aspects of our world; add
an element of uniqueness, of novelty, of our own point of view,
intention and desire; and synthesize these elements into a new moment
of creation. We can do this elegantly and gracefully or clumsily and
awkwardly. The Tao Te Ching, in the view of Ames and Hall,
gives us advice on how to do it in the most satisfying way.

We can think of the
world as being a field of energy, called Qi (pronounced
“chee”). The world and its phenomena are perturbations
that emerge out of and fold back into this energizing field. The
perturbations are not different from the energy. “Qi is
both the animating energy and that which is animated. There are no
‘things’ to be animated; there is only the vital
energizing field and its focal manifestations.”17
The fulfillment of life consists nourishing one’s qi so
as to be most vital, to live to the fullest. “[O]ne nourishes
one’s qi most successfully by making of oneself the most
integral focus of the most extensive field of qi.”18
The physical movements of Qi Gong (“Gong” means
discipline, exercise or skill) are a recent method of cultivating qi
in the physical body, similar to Tai Chi Chuan, the martial art. The
Taoist aim, however, is more than just physical health. (And to be
fair so, ultimately, are the aims of Qi Gong and Tai Chi Chuan.) In
the view of Ames and Hall, the goal is to achieve a harmonious
existence that leaves nothing out and includes all elements in a
satisfying, ongoing whole.

Several skills
contribute to the achievement of this state (which is not static, but
an ongoing and constantly changing pattern), all of which involve
some deference and restraint, some holding oneself back from
arrogantly imposing one’s will on the world.

One is wuzhi or
non-impositional consciousness. One strives to pay attention
simultaneously to the insistent particulars of one’s personal
experience and to the overarching pattern of the whole of reality. “A
full appreciation of particularity requires that we understand and be
responsive to the complex patterns of relatedness implicated in any
event” say Ames and Hall.19Wuzhi is one of the “wu-forms,” which add the
prefix “wu,” meaning roughly “not,” to terms
for various activities. Sometimes translated as “not knowing”
or “no-knowledge,” the term actually refers to refraining
from imposing predetermined categories of thought on one’s
immediate experience of reality. Of course, we cannot do this
entirely, as our very perceptual apparatus is composed of what we
might call “perceptual judgments” in addition to the raw
data of sensation and emotional tone. But we can exercise restraint
in jumping to conclusions or overlooking the details of the
particular situation by seeing it only as an example of a general
category. “Wuzhi provides one with a sense of the de
of a thing – its particular uniqueness and focus – rather
than yielding an understanding of that thing in relation to some
concept or natural kind or universal.”20
From the Tao Te Ching:

Leave off fine learning! End the nuisance
Of saying yes to this and perhaps to that,
Distinctions with how little difference!
Categorical this, categorical that,
What slightest use are they!
If one man leads, another must follow,
How silly that is and how false!
Yet conventional men lead an easy life
With all their days feast-days,
A constant spring visit to the Tall Tower,
While I am a simpleton, a do-nothing,
Not big enough yet to raise a hand,
Not grown enough to smile,
A homeless, worthless waif.
Men of the world have a surplus of goods,
While I am left out, owning nothing.
What a booby I must be
Not to know my way round,
What a fool!
The average man is so crisp and so confident
That I ought to be miserable
Going on and on like the sea,
Drifting nowhere.
All these people are making their mark on the world,
While I, pig-headed, awkward,
Different from the rest,
Am only a glorious infant still nursing at the breast.21
(Chapter 20)

Another skill is wuwei, often
inadequately translated as “no action” or “non-action.”
It does not mean not doing anything, although it certainly has the
connotation of quiescence. It means “the absence of any course
of action that interferes with the particular focus (de) of
those things contained within one’s field of influence.”22
Instead of imposing one’s will on circumstances, instead of
interfering, one acts like water, which flows to the lowest place and
ultimately prevails. Wuwei is found throughout the Tao Te
Ching. Here are some examples:

Tao abides in non-action,
Yet nothing is left undone.
If kings and lords observed this,
The ten thousand things would develop naturally.
If they still desired to act,
They would return to the simplicity of formless substance.
Without form there is no desire.
Without desire, there is tranquility.
And in this way all things would be at peace.24
(Chapter 37)

It might be useful to provide another
translation of this same verse. In the following, Ames and Hall
translate Tao as “way-making,” emphasizing its
active nature as a process.

Way-making is really nameless.

Were the nobles and kings able to respect this,
All things would be able to develop along their own lines.

Having developed along their own lines, were they to desire to depart from this,
I would realign them
With a nameless scrap of unworked wood.

Realigned with this nameless scrap of unworked wood,
They would leave off desiring.
In not desiring, they would achieve equilibrium,
And all the world would be properly ordered of its own accord.25
(Chapter 37)

Related to Wuwei is Wuzheng, striving without contentiousness:

When the Tao is present in the universe,
The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore [one] who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.26
(Chapter 46)

And throughout all of
it is a kind of mystical experience of the nothingness that underlies
all existence, the insubstantiality that is the fundamental
ontological characteristic of the world. This insubstantiality, far
from being a deficit or lack, provides endless nourishment:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.27(Chapter 40)

The breath of life moves through a deathless valley
Of mysterious motherhood
Which conceives and bears the universal seed,
The seeming of a world never to end,
Breath for [people] to draw from as they will:
And the more they take of it, the more remains.28
(Chapter 6)

Summary

Both contemporary
process metaphysics, exemplified by the philosophy of Alfred North
Whitehead, and the ancient world-view of the Chinese, captured
eloquently, if enigmatically, in the Tao Te Ching, have
similar things to say about the world and the humans who occupy it.

The world is a web of
interconnected processes, constantly changing, in which enduring
objects, including people, are patterns rather than unchanging
substance.

The human being is not
separate from the world, but intimately embedded within it, enmeshed
in and constituted by patterns of relationship.

The human being always
brings the possibility of novelty, creativity and freedom to each
moment. The human being is neither fully determined by the past nor
fully free to break out of it. The human opportunity is to include
the given-ness of the past into a new creation of beauty and harmony
in the present.

This is not mere
subjectivity, nor egotistic individualism. In order to create beauty
and harmony within one’s experience, one must of necessity
create beauty and harmony, to the best of one’s ability, in the
world because the world is the content of one’s experience.

In this effort, success
lies in deference and humility. There is far greater wisdom in the
movement of the whole pattern than in any attempt to impose one’s
own will on events.

The knowledge of these
principles and the skill to put them into practice is the proper goal
of anyone who wishes to live a fulfilling life.

Appendix: Whitehead’s Process Philosophy

This section gives a
more detailed account of Whitehead’s metaphysics than in the
body of the paper, but it does not do justice to the immense and
sophisticated body of thought that is Whitehead’s enduring
contribution to the world.

For Whitehead, the
fundamental unit of reality is what he calls an “occasion of
experience.”29
Actuality is not made up of inert substances that are extended in
space and time and only externally related to each other. Instead, it
is made up of atomic or momentary events, each of which in some
primordial way experiences its past and its present surroundings.
These events, called “actual occasions,” are “the
final real things of which the world is made up.”30
Each actual occasion experiences the past in the form of its
predecessors and the present in the form of its contemporaries, and
anticipates the future. It comes into being, goes through a sequence
of internal phases and finally passes away, becoming fixed, a datum
for the next event. The final phase of this process is not fully
determined by the beginning. There is room for novelty, for the
possibility of something new coming into being. This sequence of
phases, which Whitehead calls “conscrescence,”31
meaning “growing together,” culminates in an entity no
longer alive, existing only as a memory, as it were, for its
successors, only as an echo of the past in events in the present
which are all that are real.

You can think of actual
occasions as analogous to atoms or subatomic particles, especially
since we now know that atoms are not indestructible units but are
composed of smaller elements, which are dynamically in process.
Science tells us that things that appear to be solid entities like
tables and chairs, rocks, trees and people, are really composed of
many tiny atoms. For Whitehead, even subatomic particles are not
particles but are made up of serially ordered strings – he
calls them “societies” – of momentary actual
occasions, each flowing into the next and giving the illusion of
something that is continuously extended in time, just as the rapid
succession of individual frames in a movie appears as a continuous
picture. A single electron is a series of momentary
electron-occasions.

A series of actual
occasions forms an enduring object, a simple individual.32
These combine into two different kinds of higher-order collections,
depending on how the proto-experiences of the simple individuals
interact. The first is aggregation, a collection without unity
of internal experience. Perceptible things such as rocks and
telephones are examples of aggregations. The proto-experiences of all
the component simple individuals randomly cancel each other out, and
no higher-level, inclusive experience arises.33

The other kind of
collection is compound individual34,
in which the proto-experiences of the components bind together and
reinforce each other, giving birth to a higher-level experience, a
dominant member of the society. Subatomic particles form atoms; atoms
form molecules; molecules form cells; and cells form plants and
animals, including humans. Humans, when they are awake, are richly
conscious of their surroundings and, awake or asleep, have a unity
over time of subjective experience, intention and agency. Whitehead
suggests that something like that coherence of internality extends
all the way down to the most primitive unit of reality. He calls his
system a “Philosophy of Organism,”35
as organism is a better and more inclusive metaphor for how entities
in the world are related than mere arrangement of inert substance.

The distinction between
aggregations and compound individuals is the familiar distinction
between non-living and living beings. What is new and unique here is
the claim that even non-living beings, even at the tiniest, most
elementary level, have some sort of primordial experience. I like to
say that everything has an inside and an outside, the inside being
the world as experienced by the entity and the outside being the way
that the entity is experienced by other entities. This theory is
known technically as “pan-experientialism” or
“pan-protopsychism.”36

Another way of saying
this is that to be real is to have an effect. If you think of
something that has no effect, then what you are thinking of cannot be
real. The minimal effect something has is to be detected by something
else. We never find something being real without something else being
real as well. Relatedness, as well as process and interiority, is
fundamental to the way things are.

Verification

In what sense can a
metaphysical system such as this be verified or considered true?
Whitehead suggests four criteria: applicability, adequacy, coherence
and logical consistency. A theory is applicable if it covers some
items of experience and adequate if it covers all of them. It is
coherent if it all hangs together, if its fundamental notions cannot
be abstracted from each other. And it is logically consistent if it
contains no contradictions and its inferences are valid.37
This list does not include experimental verification. Nevertheless,
findings in contemporary science at least support, if not prove, the
process view of reality.

Here is an interesting
passage commenting on pictorial representations of the genome:

[T]he lesson of twentieth-century physics [is that] there's nothing
but trouble when we imagine our theoretical entities and constructs
at the submicroscopic level as if they were "made of"
anything like the matter of our everyday experience. At the atomic
and molecular level our descriptions have more to do with centers of
force and the intricate play of forces than with anything like the
physical stuff of our common experience. And if this is true, then
any graphic depiction of a nucleosome must be an attempt to hint at
the momentary "shape" and equilibrium of innumerable
intersecting forces – not the form of something like an
infinitesimal lump of clay. The interactions of these forces with our
sophisticated instrumentation – and not the images we
unavoidably form based on our routine perceptions of the macroscopic
world – are all we know of the molecular realm.38

There is a famous
experiment in quantum physics, replicated many times, that supports
the theory of quantum indeterminacy, that events at the quantum level
are not completely causally determined by past events. This is the
Double Slit experiment.39
One fires photons of coherent light at a double slit and records
where they land on the other side. Except it turns out that photons
are not actually particles that land somewhere.

If it were done on the
macroscopic level of everyday experience, one would fire rapid bursts
of pellets from a pellet gun at a board with two vertical slits in it
and a solid board, the target, on the other side. Some pellets would
bounce off, and some would go through the slits. On the other side,
they would hit the target and make two vertical stripes. But that is
not what happens at the quantum level, where the pellets are photons
of light and the target is photographic paper. Instead, the result is
a strong vertical stripe in the middle, the expected stripes on the
left and right, and then dimmer stripes extending outward at
intervals in each direction. Light in this case acts like waves that
cause interference patterns. That is, when a crest meets a crest, a
more intense crest results; and when a crest meets a trough they
cancel out. The stripes of light are from the crests reinforcing each
other, and the darkness in between is the from crests and troughs
canceling each other out.

Even more interesting,
when light is emitted one photon at a time and aimed at the two
slits, it shows the same interference pattern. One would expect that
a photon, if it were an enduring particle, would go through one slit
or the other. In fact it appears to act like a wave that goes through
both slits, interferes with itself, and results in an impression in
one and only one of the stripes. One cannot predict in advance in
which stripe the photon will make an impression. In between the
photon's being emitted and its being detected on the other side, it
is in an indeterminate state. There is only a probability, not a
certainty, that it will be detected at any given site.

Results of a double-slit-experiment performed
by Dr. Akira Tonomura showing the build-up of an interference
pattern of single electrons. Numbers of electrons are 10 (a), 200
(b), 6,000 (c), 40,000 (d), 140,000 (e).40

This gives credence to
the idea that enduring objects are actually series of events. A
photon is emitted. It comes into being on the near side of the two
slits, with a certain velocity and direction and a dim awareness –
Whitehead calls it a “prehension”41
– of the possibility of going through one slit or the other.
Then it perishes. The succeeding event comes into being on the other
side. It inherits its velocity and direction from its predecessor
and has a dim awareness of being on the far side of the two slits.
But where? Here I am anthropomorphizing quite a bit, but one can
imagine that it simply decides to come into being at a certain place
within the realm of possibilities, that it simply arbitrarily picks a
spot.

If this is true then
novelty, creativity and freedom – as well as awareness –
are elements of reality at the most fundamental level, and it is not
surprising that these are real possibilities for humans as well.

Revision History

Footnotes

2
The famous comment that it is not possible to step in the same river
twice, quoted by Plato, is probably a misstatement of Herclitus’
views. The point is “not that all things are changing so that
we cannot encounter them twice, but something much more subtle and
profound. It is that some things stay the same only by changing.”
Graham, “Heraclitus.”

6
Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver, p. 8. This traditional
account of Yin and Yang differs from that of the popular dietary
philosophy, Macrobiotics. Macrobiotics reverses the
expansive-contractive polarity, calling Yin expansive and Yang
contractive, but leaves intact the rest, calling Yin dark and
cooling and Yang light and warming. In the author’s humble
opinion, Macrobiotics gets it wrong and is needlessly confusing.

36
The more usual term in the history of philosophy, panpsychism, is
apt only if we do not take “psyche” to mean a
fully-developed mind like humans have but merely some sort of
interiority or private experience.